Moonlight Masquerade (18 page)

Christine stayed within her aunt’s embrace.
“I know you had, Aunt. I did too, honestly I did, but that was
before, before—”

“Before Lord Hawkhurst. Yes, my dear, I
know. But have you ever stopped to consider that you are
disappointing him as well as me? He wanted you to have a Season
before you committed yourself to him. He explained that to me most
thoroughly before we left Hawk’s Roost. I was much impressed with
his concern for you, even if I can’t quite like the idea of your
marrying the man.”

Pulling away, Christine shook her head, the
tears that were never far from the surface these days burning
behind her eyes. “I am already committed to him, Aunt. I could
never love another.”

Aunt Nellis surreptitiously wiped at the
tears that had gathered in the corners of her own eyes and plunged
into what she was afraid would be dangerous waters. “I know that
you feel that way now, Christine, but what about your feelings
after you have learned why his lordship fled to the country all
those years ago? You purposely avoid hearing anything against him.
I have heard things since we’ve been here—not that I was
indiscreet, for I wasn’t, but merely steered the conversation in
that direction once or twice—and I think you should be aware of
what he did.”

“
No!
” Christine cried, clapping her
hands to her ears. “That is the very last thing I want to do. I
refuse to listen to vicious gossip, doubtlessly twisted and turned
every which way until it barely resembles the truth. Someday
Vincent may tell me what happened, but in the meantime, I don’t
want to know. I have no interest in knowing. I’ve already told him
that.”

Aunt Nellis took a deep breath and shot off
a verbal cannon across Christine’s bow. It was time someone brought
the child to her senses. “Then you don’t care that a certain Mr.
Belden has been invalided back from Spain and is bound to put in an
appearance at Almack’s tomorrow evening?”

Christine’s head snapped back as if she had
just been slapped. “Belden—Fletcher Belden?”

Aunt Nellis carefully inspected a slight dry
area on the back of her hand. Obviously she had scored a flush hit.
“Yes, Fletcher Belden. Quite a tragic figure, I’m told. Seems he
went off with Wellington, hoping to get himself killed, but only
succeeded in making a war hero of himself, mentioned in dispatches
more than the weather.” She looked up at her niece. “Or so I’m
told.”

“I hate—” Christine began, then stopped.
Hadn’t she quite worn that particular phrase to death? Besides,
there might be a way she could turn this coincidence to her favor.
Vincent wouldn’t come to London because of Belden. What if she were
introduced to the man, got to know him? Perhaps she could effect a
reconciliation between these two troubled men. It would mean so
much to Vincent.

“Yes, Christine?” her aunt prodded, seeing
the intense look on her niece’s face and wondering what the girl
was thinking that had her looking more animated than she had in
weeks. Aunt Nellis didn’t dislike Lord Hawkhurst. It was impossible
to dislike the man who had been, although strange, very kind to
them in his own way, once he had gotten to know them.

She wasn’t even put off by his scars, which
weren’t, in truth, all that awful. There were many very fine
gentlemen in London at this very moment who had fared far worse in
the war, losing arms and legs and eyes. No, the scars didn’t bother
Aunt Nellis. But the reason those scars were there—that was another
matter entirely.

But what she liked least of all was his
effect on Christine. He had not been what she’d had in mind when
she had thought of a husband for her only niece. And after hearing
what she had since coming to London, she had even begun to doubt
her earlier good opinion of him, and remember more and more the way
he had treated them that first night, trying to throw them back out
into the cold to die.

What she had hoped for ever since Christine
was born, and especially ever since their enforced stay at Hawk’s
Roost, was that Christine would prove to be a Success. Now she also
prayed that Christine’s pretty head would be so filled with beaux
and parties and fancy balls that Vincent Mayhew would become
nothing more than a silly, romantic memory of first love.

Yet, so far, Christine had proved extremely
uncooperative. She had attended the parties her aunt had received
invitations for, but she had not exactly gone out of her way to be
congenial. As a matter of fact, if she were to be allowed to
continue on in this same way for another few weeks, the Season
would be well and truly ruined. Vincent Mayhew would win through
default.

That was why she had dared to mention
Fletcher Belden. Christine would have to be on her best behavior
and in her best looks to attract such a man. He was, from all
accounts, a truly wonderful, decent man, a man worthy of someone as
precious as Christine. He might not be the one to win her heart,
but he could be the one to rescue her from her attachment to
Hawkhurst, merely by telling her the truth about what had happened
to his sister those many years ago.

She was sure Christine would listen to what
Mr. Belden had to say, for then she would be able to satisfy her
curiosity—which she would have been less than human not to
have—without stooping to listening to gossip.

Aunt Nellis, her mind jumbled with all her
convoluted thoughts and optimistic hopes, crossed her fingers
behind her back and waited for her niece to speak.

Christine took a deep breath and exhaled
slowly, a smile lighting her features and lightening her heavy
heart. “I think I shall wear Vincent’s pearls tomorrow night, Aunt
Nellis. They should go quite nicely with my new gown, don’t you
think?”

“You’ll be the most beautiful, sought-after
young lady there, my dear,” Aunt Nellis answered happily.

C
hristine stood up
for her first waltz at Almack’s the following evening, having first
received the kind permission of one of the patronesses to take to
the floor. She had seethed inwardly at the necessity for such
foolishness when her aunt had told her of it, but then she shrugged
her shoulders and allowed herself to be led across the room toward
an imposing-looking dowager in a purple turban, saying, “Oh, well,
it is their hall, isn’t it, Sir Henry? I imagine we should humor
them.”

This potentially suicidal quip had her
partner gushing that he believed her to be “a real right un,” a
sentiment Sir Henry Winchester repeated to his three very best
friends once he had returned Christine safely to her aunt after the
waltz was over. “Nothing die-away about that one,” he added, “and
light on her feet, too. I may decide to be in love with her, if
she’s got a good portion, of course.”

“Of course,” his friends seconded in unison,
nodding solemnly for, although young, they were, after all, a
practical bunch. Beauty would, in time, fade. Wit, especially in a
woman, could grow tiring. But wealth, if handled carefully, was a
joy forever.

In order to help their friend along in his
quest to ascertain the financial eligibility of his prospective
bride, each of the three gentlemen took to the floor with Christine
in turn, an action she could only consider a mixed blessing. She
was here to see and be seen, that much was true, so it would not do
to be a wallflower, stuck in a corner with her aunt. However, she
could be grateful to the young men and still regret their
propensity for doing the majority of their dancing on her toes.

All four gentlemen had asked rather
breathless, probing questions as to her financial expectations as
they clomped through the steps of the reel and other rollicking
romps, only thinly masking them in the guise of polite dance-floor
conversation, so that Christine felt it only fair that she ask a
few questions of her own in return.

As this sort of ungloved inquisition was
rather out of the ordinary for a gentle female, the gentlemen
reported back to each other that she must surely be a heretofore
undiscovered heiress out to protect her own interests, and Sir
Henry nearly had to pop his very best friend in the nose when that
disloyal young man declared that he might just be thinking about
stealing a march on his friend for the Heiress Denham’s hand.

Society is strange as well as fickle—as well
as lamentably easy to lead—and when other gentlemen present heard
the four young men sparring over possession of the wealthy Miss
Christine Denham’s hand, she suddenly became quite the most
irresistible creature in the entire ballroom. How, they all asked
themselves, had she passed through the Season unnoticed for so
long?

“Her midnight dark hair is glorious, the
widow’s peak alluring past all words. And that perfect,
heart-shaped face!” an impecunious baron was heard to say as he
leered across the ballroom at an unsuspecting Christine.

“Sonnets should be written about those wide
eyes, those rosebud lips! Odes, to the tip of her glorious nose!
Fifty thousand a year, you say? I heard seventy-five,” an aging
baronet responded, wondering if his gout was up to a short whirl
around the floor in a good cause.

“Very nice portion—not that it matters, for
my heart is hers forevermore,” vowed a colonel home on leave to
bail his gambling-mad father out of the Fleet.

Sooner than a person could say “one hundred
thousand at four percent” Christine found herself to be the center
of masculine attention—and the target of many a nasty glare from
the females in the room. Her aunt, nearly overcome with bliss, and
for once deserted by her usual sense of impending doom, smiled and
gurgled and allowed her outrageous pink and purple ostrich feathers
to droop into her lemonade, shooed Christine back out onto the
dance floor again and again, until the poor girl had to sneak away
to the outdoor balcony to try to regain her breath.

She leaned against the railing, taking in
deep gulps of the cool night air, wondering whether or not it would
depress Aunt Nellis overmuch if she declared she had the headache
and pleaded to return to Half Moon Street.

“I had begun to disbelieve in prayers ever
being answered,” a deep, velvety smooth voice came to her out of
the darkness, “but you, my dear Miss Denham, have restored my
faith. May I now pray that you will grace me with a few moments of
your precious time before you go back inside to break more
hearts?”

Christine whirled about, placing her back
against the railing, to look into the darkened corner beside the
full-length double window. “Who—who are you? How do you know my
name?”

“Everyone knows your name, Miss Denham. It
has been the only name worth hearing on anyone’s lips all evening
long. The beautiful Miss Christine Denham. The witty Miss Christine
Denham. The very rich Miss Christine Denham.”

“
Rich?
” Christine repeated this last
statement in astonishment, still trying to make out her companion’s
figure in the shadows. Had she been doomed to forever have men
hiding from her? “The beautiful Miss Denham I might chalk up to the
thrill of the evening and a ridiculously expensive gown. The witty
Miss Denham can only point out that it is terribly easy to be witty
when your partners laugh at anything, including comments on the
weather. The rich Miss Denham, however, is beyond me. Rich, you
say?”

“
Very
rich,” the man said, correcting
her punctiliously and slowly advancing into the wedge of light cast
outside by the chandeliers in the ballroom. “By that look of
confusion on your
very
beautiful face, may I assume that the
sudden acquisition of this wealth has caught you unprepared?”

“You might assume that,” Christine agreed,
just before getting her first real look at her companion. Her
breath sucked in involuntarily and she knew her jaw was in danger
of dropping to her knees.
What a glorious man!

In height and build, he was very like her
dearest Vincent, but there the similarity ended. This man was
blond, his face deeply tanned by long exposure to the sun. When he
smiled, as he was doing now, the skin around his clear gray eyes
crinkled engagingly and a slashing dimple appeared in his right
cheek. He was impeccably dressed in the fashion dictated by the
patronesses, but his blue coat was subdued, and fit him as if he
had been molded into it. He was, in a word, magnificent! And he was
looking at her as if he believed she was magnificent as well.

“Who—who are you?” Christine heard herself
ask, unable to believe he could have been inside the ballroom
without her seeing him.

The man bowed deeply at the waist, then held
out his hand so that she felt she had no choice but to offer hers
in return. Lifting her hand to his lips, he placed a slightly
longer than proper kiss on her fingertips, and then straightened.
“My name is unimportant, for within a week we will address each
other only as “my dearest darling,’ but I will tell you it anyway,
for I am nothing if not polite. My name is Fletcher—Fletcher
Belden. Will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”